The mobile communications industry has seen a virtual explosion of growth over the past decade. The mobile terminal itself has evolved from a simplistic device offering two-way voice communications, to a device that offers rich content communication capability including, for example, color pictures, audio, music, and video clips.
The catalyst for such rich content capability began with the Short Messaging Service (SMS), which is still widely used today. With SMS, users are able to transport limited types of content including text, ringing tones, and small monochrome bit map displays using a store and forward model. In particular, the SMS message is first received by a Short Messaging Service Center (SMSC), which acts as the store and forward unit. Once the recipient becomes able to receive the message, the SMSC delivers the message to the recipient without any intervention from the recipient. The Multimedia Message Service (MMS) adds to the SMS capability by facilitating the use of richer content types including image formats such as the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) and the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) as well as audio, music, and video clips. MMS is used for rich content exchange between Web applications and mobile devices and between the Internet and mobile devices.
As the functional capabilities of the mobile terminal continue to develop, they will not only be able to download information from Web applications and the Internet, but the mobile terminal itself will become a source of information for other network components. In particular, the advanced mobile terminals available today are already capable of capturing images, creating video clips, and recording audio through the use of integrated camera and microphone resources within the mobile terminal itself. The capabilities of tomorrow's mobile terminal are restricted only by the imagination of those responsible for their design. In the near future, the mobile terminal will become an alternative form of resource storage, including storage for downloaded resources, acquired resources, locally created resources, and recreated resources, i.e., those resources created through the combination of other resource types.
Information exchange within the Internet is performed through the use of the HTTP, where an Internet Protocol (IP) address is provided to each network entity involved in the HTTP information transfer. Mobile terminals, however, are not addressed by an IP address, but are rather addressed by their Mobile Station Integrated Services Digital Network Number (MSISDN). Thus, direct transfer of information from the mobile terminal to users of the Internet via HTTP is virtually impossible.
Prior art methods of information exchange with mobile terminals require the use of a Personal Computer (PC) that is connected to the Internet. In such an instance, pictures and other information contained within the mobile terminal must first be transferred to the PC via a proximity connection such as infrared, Bluetooth, or conventional wired connections such as RS232 or RS485. Once transferred, the information must then be transferred to a Web server to enable storage and access via the Internet. Users of the Internet may then employ conventional HTTP methods to access the Web server to eventually upload the transferred information from the Web server. As such, mobile terminals today are incompatible with HTTP information exchange for several reasons.
In order to facilitate HTTP transfer of information directly from a mobile terminal to users of the Internet, several problems must be addressed. First, routing of HTTP requests to mobile terminals is a challenge due to the lack of IP address capability for mobile terminals. Mobile terminals are not assigned fixed IP addresses currently and it is expected that IP addresses for mobile terminals will not be assigned for quite some time to come. Additionally, no HTTP server functionality currently exists for mobile terminals today and the expense of providing such a function is likely to be exorbitant.
Accordingly, there is a need in the communications industry for a system, apparatus and method that allows and facilitates HTTP transfer directly to/from the mobile terminals operating within a mobile network. In addition, utilization of current technology to allow direct HTTP communication to mobile terminals should be implemented where applicable in order to reduce cost of implementation.